It’s been really great talking to Andy , Jeremy , Stuart and Derek at javascript get-together and they certainly convinced me that I could and should do more to make my web applications accessible. However after a few days of thinking, I still have issues that seem to lack a good solution.

First of them is window.onload . Ppk already explained the problem quite well. There’s also a workaround, which I admit I’m using right now, and that is to have an inline event handler on body tag. There are only two problems with this approach:

1. inline event handlers are even more despised than inline CSS styles
2. we are mixing XHTML/HTML with Javascript, which is a no-no as well
3. it doesn’t really work if you don’t have at least a simple function to check and handle, if external javascript code has been loaded yet

Personally, I think all points make a lot of sense when not taken to extreme. I sincerely doubt that webpage/application suffers a lot, if this is the only inline event handler in the whole document and inlined code in head is kept to minimum. We often use CSS to add behavior (a:hover), where it just makes sense and I think we should be able to use inline Javascript on occasions as well.

In my case, I’m living in a country, where majority of users are still on a dial-up and most of them will stay there for a while. Since parts of my application can fetch 20 or more 5-10K sized images on a single page, I don’t want to force users to wait 20 seconds or more before application starts to behave reasonably. I also can’t rely on x/html layer behavior because of framestack javascript technique and their problems, about which I plan to write more in the following few days.

The only other alternative I see right now is to hide UI by default and display it using Javascript, which is hardly an improvement. If anything, it’s a step back.

I guess I’m in this mess because I didn’t build an html version first and upgraded it with Javascript. Why this happened and how come I don’t think it was necessarily a bad thing, is a topic for another day. But it certainly left me with a puzzle to solve.

So, any ideas, apart from obvious one of having a working html version with added javascript?

Update: Ppk does .

This is a first post on my new development oriented blog.

I returned from @media2005 yesterday, where I got the feeling that either you have a blog on which you share your thoughts and possible insights or you have no good way to join the discussion except few times a year on conferences like the last one, which certainly can’t be and isn’t enough.

Therefore I decided to make a new start, this time in English and about subjects where I might have a bit more interesting things to say than what happened to my non-existant cat.

So, welcome to anyone who happened to come to this place and I hope you’ll find it at least mildly useful, if not entertaining.